Existential Moments

It's a God thing!

The 1st Night of School

Our daughter attended, survived and thrived in her first day of Kindergarten. It's been a journey of a day, filled with introspection, reflection, joys, good karma and quasi-out-of-body-experiences. I went to pick up our daughter after school with our family. As we waited with the all the other kindergarten families. As I walked back down the hall, taking in all of the families, relational encounters, excitement-filled words and laughter, I started to cry. Slight visible tears that expressed my deep gratitude. My thankfulness for being there, for our daughter being in a public school, for us being able to be a family in the school community that we deeply longed to be in. Being there at the school, 3 generations of our family, I was aware that it was an existential MOMENT - a ripple in time in which the deepest meaning of human existence and universal meaning, faith in a living God and the fullness of community were intertwined, integrated and interconnected.

It got me thinking. How often do we pass alongside such moments, not just "happy" times, but such existential moments - those instances or experiences when the fullness of God transcends the urgency and coming and going of daily existence to transform it into those glimmers of eternity, those shimmerings of what life is meant to be and what life is all about? That sounds all philisophical and theological...but I think that's what faith and human existence is all about. I mean those time when we are "transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect," (Romans 12:2)

I think we're so often so lost, thinking (most likely because of our hyper-individualistic western and capitialistic American Culture) that it's all about us, that what we want and what we "see" are what really ARE. Maybe we're so self-focused or consumed with the tyranny of the urgent that we pass alongside what is really imporant, what is radically meaningful, and what is deeply human. Maybe we go so quick and fast in our every day life that we zip through those moments of transcendence and full-presence of the divine like a car seeking to cruise through the carpool lane to get to the FastTrak entrance ahead of everyone else? Why is it that we most often skip over those times, encounters, and moments that make the most meaning of our existences in order to get to the next thing on our list?

Maybe that's what FAITH is all about...seeking to see, to experience, to live in and live from those existential moments; to recognize God's radical presence in our lives and days from which we find meaning and through which we can be irreversibly transformed (the Christian Theological world is redeemed and sanctified) in order to (re-)become the people that we were created, intended and set apart to be. Maybe a faith-full life is not one in which there are massive amounts of such experiences and relational encounters...but rather one that recognizes that such mountain-top theophany/encounters are rare, preciously rare... and that we live not from one such moment to the next, but rather that we live by faith, emerging from one such encounter, sustaining, maintaining and propelling us into and through life?